Suddenly, without warning, every single one of my campaigns has been silently cut off. I was only able to determine this based on similar horrors that have befallen *paying* adwords advertisers recently. There is no email saying by the way, don't pull your hair out trying to figure out what happened, we've "pulled" your account for some sort of review. Even though it is not in the least bit clear why the account must be pulled offline during this review. That as with any substantive question simply cannot be answered by anyone at Google.
So what have we done today? Taken an honest advertiser, one who goes out of their way to make sure ad phrasing and offers do not even inadvertently mislead a customer and subject them to the unknowing angst of not realizing if and whether the account will be put back on-line. Additionally, a substantial loss of income will result from this. Especially since this is Friday and this account won't even enter the queue of those to be "reviewed" until at least Monday.
My account has not substantially changed since it began in October 2004. A very minimum of ads have been disapproved over that time, usually for silly reasons. The vast majority of my sites are wholesome. Admittedly, there have been a few "soft" adult campaigns running since day 1. More in the sexual help vein, not pornography.
So who remains when you search on one of the hundreds of products for which I've tailored a personalized ad, no dynamic insertion of "dead cats" anywhere in the campaigns?
What remains are a bunch of irrelevant ads who do not guide you to the widget you want to purchase, but either try to lure you in the door by bidding high enough and long enough to sustain a high CTR on common words like "buy" and "widget". Are these large misleading campaigns that could care less what particular widget the searcher is looking for treated with such arrogance? I seriously doubt it since these same competitors of mine have been advertising consistently as long as I have and must have generated sufficient account data to deserve a review since they turn up for every search with any mention of a large variety of "widgets"
What does remain when you search on one of the particular widgets that I market when one searches on "special widget" where widget is far too generic a term to base showing a result on? Especially on a search engine that continuously clamors about "ad relevance". What remains are large companies whose ads only appear because they broad match on any term with "widget" even though no one sets out simply to buy a "widget".
1) A large merchant site with no mention of my "special widget"
2) A company that promises to sell a "secret list" of where I can get widgets cheap, no mention of my "special widget" anywhere on the site though.
3) A dubious shopping comparison site, found my widget when I conducted a secondary search and it suggested sources, many pointing me back to a famous auction house. Oddly, this comparison site, omitted the vendor of the "special widget" that I was marketing although that vendor has the best price for the "special widget". So 2 main goals of adwords are lost on this one. First, it makes me search again. Second, it purports to act like an Internet scanning search service when all it is a sub-contracting of adwords.
3) Promised 50% off in ad, takes me to home page, no mention of "special widget"
4) Another shopping comparison site, long search, found the most common word, "widget" showed useless results. Back button didn't work
5) Finally, I discovered a fortunate affiliate's page directing me precisely to the widget that I was seeking. Well, s/he will have a lucrative week without my competition and I don't begrudge that person. Affiliates in many sectors on adwords are now the only honest advertisers with no hidden agenda. They can't afford to lure in just anyone looking for a widget on the hope of making the occasional sale. Ironically, affiliates are the most relevant of advertisers in adwords.
6) A religious site that is either bidding on the wrong keywords or is a victim of a buggy adwords algo. I suspect that is why broad match starts out as exact now. Its flawed algo turned up too many inappropriate results before.
7) A famous auction house where I can bid on "special widget" for .01, they claim
8) A site that won't sell the widget, but wants me to sign up for lots of free offers, a joke of an ad.
9) Irrelevant site offering loads of downloads, but no "special widget".
I deserve to be there. I would have been #2 or 3 and would have provided the searcher with an honest transaction. I've always made every effort to comply with new policies as they become known. As an affiliate with many sites, my content is adequate, though not thrown up for the sake of spamming the site with words and links the shopper could care less about. I also don't play into the game of providing the desired bells and whistles like so called "shopping comparisons" that google seems to believe in although the results can be easily manipulated. If that penalizes me, it suggests deeper flaws in google's motives than are already suspected.
I must be giving the customer exactly what they want since they keep clicking and buying to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars a day. I get emails of appreciation, questions from shoppers that I answer personally and I'm pulled without explanation. However, google knows what's best for the world, so they think for now.
I'm sure the only answer that I will be given is that once the review is completed, if I've done nothing wrong, I have nothing to fear. Similar to the random interrogations that might take place under a totalitarian regime. Simply dismissed with "Your papers are in order, you are free to go".
As long as you give away some hats or radios now and then "google is g_d". Do you expect that to play forever? Doesn't anyone at google for a moment stop to think that Microsoft and perhaps others are carefully preparing a service that provides "relevant ads" and at least "passable customer service". The cheery, repetitive canned answers to any inquiry have taken on almost a spooky quality of late.
This Kafkaesque lunacy is enough to make me suspect that google somehow knew that I was reviving my Overture campaigns all day. Since it's become obvious with google's whimsy of late, one never knows when the rules will change, how they've changed, why you're on hold, why your ad didn't show, what "tool" is trustworthy at the moment and on and on. I don't believe google knows most of the time either.
So that other advertisers know, this appears to coincide with passing 10,000,000 impressions. The way to tell your ads are not showing is by using the ads diagnostic tool which will report back "You have no ads that match the search term". Sort of like you never existed.
This is an intolerable way for a company to treat its high paying customers and only source of real revenue. Common sense would indicate many other ways to accomplish the same goal. It could be done campaign by campaign. It could be done without the account being turned off. No answer has ever been provided for the reasoning behind that one. The simple courtesy of an email when the account is taken offline would have softened the blow somewhat. However to learn that 1/3 of your income has been indefinitely suspended with no reason given and no definite date of restoration is rightfully galling to any reasonable person.
If this is a method to catch a few crooks off-guard at the expense of the law abiding majority, it doesn't fly in a free society, so nor will it work for long in a market economy. New players are always waiting to fill any void in service or fill in gaps in customer satisfaction.
Very Greatly Disappointed,
patient2all
I'm not a Google-basher, but this policy and lack of an e-mail is really a poor business practice.
I imagine one solution would be to keep a second account under a different ID. If your campaigns are large, this could be a problem. But suppose every time you create a campaign, you create an identical campaign under the second account and put it on pause. Then when the day comes when ads stop running, put everything in the first account on pause and activate the second account. It's worth the second activation fee.
This is fun, marvelling at the ridiculousness of the ads!
My campaigns are all suddenly silent. I'm not deserving of even a clue of how long and whether they'll be able to come back up or whether I've violated some rule enforcement "entirely at the discretion of google" when I checked that box in the TOS. I do plan to attach some of the bells and whistles that google claims to require on an "affiliate site" as opposed to whatever other kinds of "real" sites haunt the Internet and adwords.
Before one of the usual suspects snaps back with "Why don't you work on your own sites instead of worrying about others?", I'll point out that for better or worse, I've had little interest in the competition until now and I work my tail off on my sites between research and construction and my other consulting.
I've been something of a maverick, operating by what I've gleaned through a lot of reading, at least some of which turned out to be nonsense. For every SEO/PPC theorem, there is also a counter theorem supported by an equal amount of adamant adherents.
Indeed though, I made the mistake of procrastination by not having more robust campaigns running at some of the other trustworthy PPCs. I'm paying dearly for that. Clicks and purchases still come in from the SERPs, but fear of the "Google Dance" makes me reluctant to place too much hope in sustained results from Google Serps. BTW, Yahoo has been much more consistent in my rankings and I see a fair amount of clicks coming in from my older campaigns through Yahoo. The problem is my most profitable campaigns tend to be newer.
But while much of the discussions here tend to revolve around B2B campaigns and strategies, it appears from just a couple of random 'mystery surfing' exercises that the consumer is getting the short shrift from adwords results. In fact, in a lot of cases, it appears they'll suffer more than a short shrift, but an actual ripoff of their valuable funds.
I read of strange stuff discussed among B2B SEM strategists. Spy vs. Spy campaigns, where a business will actually start campaigns for their competition in order to see what kinds of conversions the competition is capable of. I'm not smart enough to see the logic behind such tactics, so just being a small entrepreneur; I gloss over those threads as quickly as I bypass the "hat" amusements.
Perhaps I belong in the Affiliates Forum, however what I've learned of late directly affects adwords and has no other tie to affiliates, per se, except that they seem to be the more docile creatures in this retail market PPC Zoo.
This phenomenon evolved due to two recent changes to adwords policies. One, by losing the affiliates who lacked the ability to maintain a passable website, cheap positions have been freed up for the "chaff" of internet marketers who couldn't make first page results with all those darn 2 or 3 affiliates in the way. Second, the new method of employing broadmatching has resulted in sellers with niche products unable to garner enough "exact" broad impressions over their lifetimes to expand to even the simpler forms of true broad matching - "a red widget" when their keyword list only contains "red widget".
The larger companies now broadmatch on any searcher who includes "buy" or "widget" (where widget could be the 10th. most common word in the language) and show on every search. The goal of relevant ads is clearly lost when this is the best the computer can do in assessing "relevance".
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I tried another test tonight of what would be a popular search to see what the consumer searcher (quite possibly mom) would get back were she to consult the adword results.
buy certain children's widget
returns the following on virtually every search. Again widget is a very general word that no one would search on by itself or be impressed by the fact that a merchant did indeed sell widgets.
adwords results:
The stores had appeared to have mostly paid for their listings on this "Internet Search". This was sort of a PPC service within a PPC ad. Their "About" page stated that the list contained paid as well as unpaid listings, though the paid listings were featured first.
I'm not that techie, but I wondered how the non-paying stores, if culled from the SERPs were passed the "certain children's widget" name unless the initial PPC advertiser knew the search query syntax for each of these outfits. It's presumed that even if they didn't pay for their listing, they must have provided this information to the PPC ad during some signup process. So while this looked to the average customer like a true internet search was being performed, I highly doubt that was the case. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
The stores found, mostly unknown names, indeed had the item, though in 4 cases, the price was $1-4 dollars higher than the "Internet Search" turned up (which made it no bargain at all) and one price was a "members" price. To perform the comparison took about 15 full minutes on a fairly decent PC by the time the scripts and queries returned results for all the vendors.
I can't imagine too many surfers attempting a thorough analysis of these results to purchase an under $15.00 widget. Again, the affiliates "certain children's widget" site was conspicuously absent from these implied unbiased results.
Indeed, most consumers still "trust" the internet results and believe they are seeing unbiased computer generated results and are not being swayed toward certain advertisers. This is a poor substitution for the famous "relevance".
So is there any chance that google will admit that affiliates provide some value to the search results (besides being "allowed" to advertise as someone pointed out the other day)? The real threats and time thiefs to consumers come from these more sophisticated "Made for adwords" operations that have proliferated.
Hey, affiliates, if you can't manage the content requirements for adwords, then maybe adsense sites are for you. Without looking hard I found a whole network of "medical" information sites (that had been operating longer than I've been in adwords). Each one contains perhaps 100 category pages with its own ads and between 50 - 200 words of text pulled from a medical book.
Since the same material gets used by multiple sites, a word or two is changed here and there to stymie either the Google Bot or some automated AdSense checker. These changes to what ostensibly originated as legitimate medical advice sometimes can result in series misinformation. Consider the following altered statement:
Other types of Ovarian Cancer are malignant or cancerous
Read that a second time if need be.
Potentially tragic to one willing to cling to any hope or who simply believes if it is on the Internet, it must be true.
Now I stumbled onto these by accident. Struck me funny that one of the adsense sites was called Prodisease.com - seemed like an odd name. What I found was an endless nest of similar sites advertising on each other's pages as well as on legitimate adsense sites.
They obviously wanted to capitalize on the ads from Big Pharma, surgical supplies and sadly also included the legitimate non-profit health organizations (who I hope google allows to advertise for free) among their results.
I didn't even go any further with this, but this #$*! is evil!
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So google, perhaps it's time to spend a little more time tidying up the rest of the house before attacking the innocuous affiliates who I really haven't heard any complaints about except from the web purists and elitists.
It was never my plan but I'm thinking maybe "g_d put me here to p!s$ the world off!"
Though I'm trying so hard to be a google cheerleader....
patient2all
How are things going on now? Got your ads shown?
As abruptly as the account stopped last Thursday morning, it resumed Monday evening. No notification at either point. When I called support on Friday morning to inquire as to why the account had stopped suddenly on Thursday, the representative said she couldn't get into my account so it must be under review.
I asked if they could verify that was indeed the reason. My suggestion of a return phone call was declined and I was asked for an email address instead. Near the end of the day on Friday, I called back to report I still hadn't heard any word by email. I was told that I'll have to be patient. I was. On the telephone, I'm uniformly gracious, especially to women.
The account remained stopped through the weekend and I only became aware that it was back up when I was playing with a SEO tool that came in an emailed newsletter and it displayed a Google results page which included one of my ads.
I looked at my account and saw impressions and clicks for today. It now appears to be back to full speed; no ads were disapproved.
Curiously I entered an on-line support ticket (before I had any knowledge of the review) pointing out that my account had simply stopped. I received an email from support tonight after the account was running again. The suggestion though was that I try re-entering my credit card information again and clicking "Save". I knew there was no issue with the card, especially after being told on the phone that the account had triggered a review, so I didn't mess with that one.
So the down side was about $500.00 profit lost. The upside was the discovery that my newer sites are much more popular in the Yahoo and MSN SERPs than I realized since I did get several orders on different sites.
While I'm relieved to be up and running again, quite frankly the fact that only you, Clinyi, who I don't pay a few thousand dollars a month to, were the only party who thought to follow up on my status leaves a bad taste regarding how the process is handled.
Google really must rethink the policy of no notification at either beginning or end when these interruptions occur, regardless of the need for these audits. Even an auto-generated email would have made some difference. Initially, one spends considerable time checking budgets and status before writing a support ticket.
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One more odd thing, when I go into an existing ad and try to correct an innocent typo, I receive the message "widget widget may violate our 'No Repetition' standard". Normally, I would expect to be asked for an exception request, now I have no choice but to cancel the change. In this case, 'widget widget' is a legitimate phrase (previously approved I would imagine) like 'Pago Pago' and was not even what I was trying to correct.
I'm wondering if my account remains frozen to updates for some reason. Far too much mystery here and I'm not doing anything outrageous in any of my campaigns. I'm an innocent affiliate with decent websites for the most part (save for a couple of META re-directs I never took out). What's up?
Thanks for asking, Clinyi!
patient2all
Good to see your ads are back up - I mean, although you may be a competitor of mine, I still feel your pain and relate to your frustration.
It seems odd to me that ads need to be stopped during a review, whether the review be automated or manual, unless there was some definite evidence of wrongdoing, such as not living up to the TOS. What practical purpose could stopping the ads serve? It costs the advertiser, and it costs G.
The other thing I don't get is why the lack of communication with the advertiser - sure, if you want to do a secret review, but for you and for most of us, it's only a secret for about the first hour, before we notice the ads aren't running. And by that time we at least deserve a notification with explanation and eta of when the ads will be up and running again (assuming a passing grade).
I humbly accept that G is probably far more important to any of our bottom lines than we are to theirs, but it doesn't make sense to needlessly hurt relations with us who are pouring hundreds or thousands into their bank account each month.
In my case I have been told by my dedicated G rep that she would personally contact me if there were any serious issues about my sites that needed addressing. But even if you don't qualify for a G rep, it still baffles me why it would be ok to treat you like that. Perhaps an apology of some sort is in order plus an adwords gift certificate to make up some of what you would have spent on G had there been no review ;-)
For a company of G's magnitude, I'm sure such a guesture wouldn't make a dent but would pay back in spades in terms of goodwill among advertisers, be they small or large, affiliate or not.
It would be nice to hear AWA on this one - maybe explain these reviews further, maybe pass on our sentiments to the kind folks at G who push the buttons and pull the strings.
Cheers,
Doug
